but the underlying problem is that IE6s are still sticking in big enterprise/workplace where they do not have a choice of uninstalling it.

And big enterprises are places with deep pockets. They'd happily pay the IE6 tax.

I'm not really serious about the idea, but the idea of taxing users of outdated software could lead to some pretty interesting applications.

The enterprises wouldn't decide to pay the IE tax. The decision would have to be made by the end-users forced to use IE6. And they wouldn't pay.

End users at large enterprise companies have zero say in the support browsers of that organization. These policies are put in place by their IT organization which in some cases manages all applications and patches that are pushed down to an individual's machines. In those large companies even Windows patches are managed in house and not through the standard Windows update process. I think those companies will easily stomach an additional charge for IE6 since they're used to paying for everything else. That said, I'm sure they'll use their size to attempt to negotiate themselves a better price.

Have you ever tried to make a sale to this sort of company? It'll take three years before they even bother to react.

Thankfully no, but given the speed those companies move I wouldn't be surprised if IE6 is still there, 3 years later.

Then offer an IP-range license deal for them.

TL;DR => Most users in large enterprises cannot get rid of IE6 even if they want to.

I working for a large company (100,000+ employees) in the US and we are stuck with IE6. We cannot uninstall or upgrade it without admin rights, which 99% of employees do not have.

A small minority of tech-savvy employees use Chrome or Firefox, but this is heavily frowned upon. Once when my hard disk crashed, our internal tech support team tried to blame the fact that I use Firefox instead of IE6 as the reason.

Then your company needs to fire their tech team en masse and hire some up-to-date techies.

You'd be shocked at how much very expensive enterprise software has never been updated to support anything newer than IE6. It's not that enterprises don't want to upgrade their users, but that their hands are largely tied (hooray for Chrome Frame!).

Everytime somebody says this is a good enough reason to support IE6 my only thought is "screw enterprise users".

Which works great, unless they're part of your target market.

Is the cost of supporting IE6 worth hanging on to those impressions/sales? That's a call you've got to make on a case-by-case basis.

Actually, the biggest pool of IE6 users are people from poor countries running pirated copies of Windows XP with no access to automatic updates.

I checked out http://gs.statcounter.com/ . Select Browser Version, maybe view as bar graph.

Africa and Asia lead in IE6 by almost 25%. I was surprised, but it does make sense -- pirated XP comes with IE6, people can't use Windows Update, so they just stick with it.

Not entirely coincidentally, Asia - with its high-bandwidth internet infrastructure - sends a lot of spam. (Although it's getting better lately.)

They have access to Firefox's and Chrome's automatic updates!

Just like everywhere else, they'll use what comes with the OS.

Just because they have a pirated version of XP doesn't mean they heard about Firefox or Chrome.

I hadn't heard this before. Do you have data to support that claim?

Here's the article I remembered:

http://www.troyhunt.com/2010/08/aye-pirates-be-reason-ie6-ju...

Interestingly, some specific countries (namely the Phillipines and Indonesia) have a much lower IE6 usage than their equally poor neighbours, due to a very high market share of Firefox.

Another interesting fact: Both Taiwan (40%) and South Korea (43%) have piracy rates comparable to Singapore (37%), but 5-6 times more IE6 users (32-38% vs 6%). The correlation is not particularly strong there. Other factors might be at play.

In South Korea, for example, all payment gateways and government portals are required by law to have certain "security features", which can only be implemented as an ActiveX control. (Good luck with security!) That explains the 94%+ IE adoption rate. Also, all those ActiveX controls break every time a new version of IE comes out, so users are understandably reluctant to move away from IE6. In fact, I've heard rumors that the only reason IE8 still supports ActiveX is that the South Korean government specifically requested it.

Of course, China and India together totally skew the statistics. Each of them is bigger than everybody else combined.

I've found this to be true. Firefox is very, very popular in the Philippines on all those pirated WinXPsp3 boxes.